Flogging the dead Kyoto horse in Doha … and the UK

Peter C. Glover, has a very succint take on the state of the climateers’ union in today’s edition of The Commentator. As the run-up to the Nov. 26 – Dec. 7 confab of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) begins the charge of the blight brigade, Glover writes (h/t GreenCease via twitter):

Where better than the Qatari capital to perform the last rites over the Kyoto Protocol?

It’s uniquely appropriate that November’s UN Climate Summit – the last before the Kyoto Protocol formally expires on December 31st – is taking place in Doha. In the league of the world’s highest per-capita greenhouse gas emitters, Qatar currently ranks at the very top. Where better than the Qatari capital to perform the last rites over the Kyoto Protocol?

Not that that’s how November’s talks will be sold, you understand. In typical UN double-speak, the Climate Summit secretariat will fashion a form of words suggesting that the Kyoto process is alive and well and merely moving into a ‘new phase’. So why do the terms ‘flogging’ and ‘dead horse’ come to mind?

[…]

n truth, backing the Kyoto ‘horse’ had failure written all over it. The treaty was on life support right from its inception. Hardly surprising given the economic implications for the 37 industrialized states expected to bear the industry-hitting burden of emission cuts while also having to stump up enormous reparations to the non-industrialized world to atone for their sinful ‘polluting’ ways. By the time of the 2009 ‘(another) last chance for the planet’ Copenhagen Summit, the Kyoto ‘horse’ was already looking suspiciously bereft of breath.

[…]

But it was the abject failure to grasp the economics that was the real blind spot. Bottom line: If the price of saving the planet is more than we can actually afford, then it’s really already beyond saving. Greens and idealists have never understood the facts of economic life.

Pre-Copenhagen, UN Secretary-General told us, “We have just four months to secure the future of our planet.” What the conference ultimately foundered on was the 37 industrialized states balking at handing over a cool $100 billion to the non-industrialised states.

At the same time, polls in the democratic states increasingly reflected growing scepticism at pouring billions of dollars into an anti-carbon campaign to help keep an ‘anticipated’ global temperature rise to below 2 degrees (ah yes, the age-old yearning to control the weather). Why, wondered an increasing number, should the price be so high when the cost of keeping the temperature rise at nil for 15 years had cost us precisely nothing?

[…]

The UN [Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change] IPCC was again valiant in its attempt to re-ignite public concern. But even their pre-summit report was forced to admit that there was unlikely to be any earth-warming for the next 20 or 30 years. This, according to the IPCC report: “because climate change signals are expected to be relatively small compared to natural climate variability.” Hardly the key message Durban was hoping to hear to ferment international action.

Just for good measure, Donna Laframboise’s The Delinquent Teenager who was Mistaken for the World’s Top Climate Expertexposed the UN IPCC in all its inept, politicized, incoherent, and outright corrupt glory. Anyone who may care to read this devastating critique could only conclude that the real alarm was that anyone could consider this shambolic, dysfunctional, pseudo-scientific oligarchy credible in any way.

[…]

Kyoto failed in its chief goal of achieving legally binding global emission cuts, much as the Bush White House foresaw it would because of its economy-busting potential, mostly for the industrialized nations. The UNIPCC has also been forced to admit that the “natural variations” inherent in climate change means it wildly overstated its case.

What the UNIPCC fails to explain is how those same “natural variations” make claims to climate catastrophe 30 years down the line any more credible. [emphasis added -hro]

Meanwhile … the greenest of ’em all U.K. Guardian provides some “insight” into the “inflamed” air we might expect over the next few months on the part of NGOs and celebrities. Although one might be somewhat relieved that Ban Ki-Moon’s 2009 “just four months to secure the future of our planet” has now been superceded by the new, improved, doom and gloom timeline they offer. We now have fifty months to prevent catastrophic climate change and save the planet:

Greenpeace and Oxfam among those warning that more must be done to stop critical climate change threshold being breached

[…]

The signatories [of a letter to the Guardian] including senior figures at Greenpeace, Oxfam and the Women’s Institute, as well as the designer Dame Vivienne Westwood and the environmental campaigner Bianca Jagger, warn there are just 50 months left before it will become unlikely that a 2C temperature rise can be prevented. The UK and the EU have set the 2C mark as a line the world should not cross.

[…]

The campaigners say the lack of action comes against a backdrop, this year, of a record loss of sea ice, greenhouse gas concentrations above the Arctic at their highest point for possibly 800,000 years, and crop-wrecking droughts and record temperatures in the US mid-west.

[…]

John Sauven, executive director of Greenpeace , has committed to more direct action to protect the Arctic from oil drilling, while Westwood said there was a need to inflame public opinion and blame politicians for the crisis.

The letter urges politicians to say what they will do “to grab the opportunity of action and prevent catastrophic climate change”. [emphasis added -hro]

As I had remarked to the congregation at Bishop Hill, perhaps these NGOs and celebs should approach Paul Simon and request that he release a modified version of:

Something along the lines of ….

“The problem is all inside your head”, she said to me
The answer is easy if you take it logically
I’d like to help you in your struggle for 2-C
There’s just fifty months to save the planet

She said it’s really not my habit to intrude
Furthermore, I hope my data won’t be lost or misconstrued
But I’ll repeat myself, at the risk of being crude
There’s just fifty months to save the planet
Fifty months to save the planet

[To which BH commenter HaroldW has added]

“Just hop on your bike, Mike”
“Paint your roof white, Dwight”

[and BH commenter Eric H. has chimed in with]

You just add a new tax, Jax
Graph a new plan, Mann (ooops!)
Don’t try to be coy, Roy (Spencer?)
Just be carbon free
Take the bus, Gus
Don’t question temps and such
Wind is the key, Lee
To be carbon free

So …. while I complete the analysis of my recent Survey results, your mission – should you choose to accept it – is to complete the new, improved lyrics for the doomsters’ proposed anthem, to help them “inflame public opinion” ;-)

2 thoughts on “Flogging the dead Kyoto horse in Doha … and the UK”

She said, “Let’s give your firm the favour of some laws
Public spending is all right if in service to good cause.”
Then came the subsidies, and the money had no flaws.
There’s only fifty months to save the planet.